John Krubski
I have to confess that I’m feeling a little bit like the kid in the story of the Emperor’s New Clothes – and I just can’t contain myself anymore.
Friends, we have gone clear off the rails on this one and we don’t even know it. We have regressed from a studied and considered socio-demographic appreciation of generations over to a model defined by the protocols of Excel spreadsheets. Folks, we have thrown countless future generations of babies out with the social media bathwater. X, Y, Z – and now Generation Alpha and Generation AA? Really?
Recently, I was asked to make a presentation about the Gen6 Factor – the implications, opportunities, and challenges presented by having six contemporaneous generations in our society. As it happens, this little appreciated phenomenon is the only truly unprecedented thing to happen to humans in millennia.
Things were going well until someone asked me when I was going to talk about Gen Y and Gen Z; to whom I had been referring as Millennials and Homelands respectively, throughout my presentation. “But what about Gen Y and Z” …. they continued to insist. That was the moment I realized how deeply we had entered into the Twilight Zone of demographic generational inquiry.
Where did we go wrong?
No less an entity than Forbes Magazine fell prey to the madness in an August 11, 2019 article entitled “How Gen Z (and Gen AA) Are Reshaping the Economy.” Way back in December of 2015, Business Insider credited “Futurist, demographer, and TedX speaker Mark McCrindle” with leading the campaign to call anyone born after 2010 a part of Generation Alpha [my emphasis]. And the alphabet soup generation train is getting longer by the minute.
Why should this matter? Because words matter. Names Matter. Names have meaning. Defining moments matter. We are in the middle of recognizing that what comes after the covid pandemic will be different from what was before the pandemic because this is a socio-politico-economic defining moment. So was the turning of the Millennium. So was WWII. So was the violation of the American homeland.
Human history is a long road with many defining milestones. Each of those milestones has affected, indeed defined, the generation formed in its wake – and that’s how the generational nomenclature was arrived at.
Since 1992 we had a model that works.
Up until the Xers came along, we were simultaneously content and enlightened by a generational nomenclature devised by Messrs. Strauss and Howe (the 1992 authors of Generations: The History of America’s Future 1584 to 2069). In that simple yet meaningful model, each generation was shaped by a defining moment that occurred in their evolution as a generational cohort of values and attitudes. The authors’ model was supported by history, data, and information dating back some 500 years and some 20 generations of the American saga.
One of the beautiful elegances of the generational naming model devised by Strauss and Howe is that the name of each generation tells you much about that generation in the briefest possible form. How did we get into this alphabetical morass? With a simple misunderstanding… or rather an absolute lack of understanding.
Strauss & Howe were able to define generations through formative events going back to the 15th and 16th Century in Europe. Those cohorts included the Arthurian Generation, the Humanist Generation, the Reformation Generation, the Reprisal Generation, The Elizabethan Generation, the Parliamentary Generation, and the Puritan Generation. If you know a bit of history, the very names can tell you the generational story. (For a full list – https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Strauss%E2%80%93Howe_generational_theory#Late_Medieval_Saeculum)
“X” is not a letter of the alphabet.
Descriptive nomenclatures were flowing along nicely with this schema right on up through the Baby Boomer era, and then something happened that led us straight to today’s quandry. The subsequent generation couldn’t get readily named. No one seemed to agree on a rational, intuitively appropriate, name. Until, that is, the perfect name for a generation that would not be named presented itself.
“Author William Strauss noted that around the time [Douglas] Coupland’s 1991 novel [Generation X: Tales for an Accelerated Culture] was published the symbol “X” was prominent in popular culture, as the film Malcolm X was released in 1992, and that the name “Generation X” ended up sticking. The “X” refers to an unknown variable or to a desire not to be defined… Strauss’s coauthor Neil Howe noted the delay in naming this demographic cohort saying, “Over 30 years after their birthday, they didn’t have a name. I think that’s germane.” Previously, the cohort had been referred to as Post-Boomers, Baby Busters (referencing the drop in the birth rates following the baby boom),[19] New Lost Generation, latchkey kids, MTV Generation, and the 13th Generation (the 13th generation since American independence).” (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Generation_X)
Clearly, the “x” in Generation X is not an alphabetical sequence in any sense of the word. It is in fact the unknown in an equation, the unknown factor in any consideration, the unknown or the un-nameable in anything. Knowing this, how could any informed, educated, adult base their understanding of future generations on y, z, and whatever comes alphabetically next? This particular “X” is a singularity. Nothing can precede it. Nothing can follow it.
Are we courting disaster?
If that knowledge is not enough to invalidate X-Y-Z, how about logic and metaphysics? If we’re going with the alphabetical thing… how do you rationalize starting at the end? By the same token, in magical lore, naming something manifests it. Are we possibly courting the manifestation of The Final Generation? I say – why tempt the universe.
On the other hand, if we go back to the sequence of “Millennials” (who marked the turn of the Second Millennium, and all that represents) succeeded by “Homelands” (who personally witnessed the vulnerability of the American Homeland and all THAT represents) then it might logically lead us to see the incipient generation not as Z-The Final Generation of Humanity, but as the values and attitudes cohort spawned in and defined by the first truly global pandemic of the Information Age. We would then get a meaningful handle on the foundational generational shift that’s likely to serve as the prism of understanding the values, attitudes, motivations, and intentions for this generation.
Restoring the Generational Continuum.
Building on the totality of Strauss & Howe’s robust model of generational precedents, four cyclical turnings, and four generational archetypes (see article above), the post-Homeland generation is likely to be a Prophet generation. It will echo many of the themes propagated by the most recent Prophet generation, the Baby Boomers – idealism, consensus around a new societal order, and a coming of age as the self-absorbed (and self-anointed, crusaders of an Awakening). And, YES, those were the hallmarks of Baby Boomers. In spite of the fact that we are now seen as “the establishment,” we Boomers struck out in a new direction of idealism and community (we believed we invented the idea of harmonious “communes”; as apparently so do many other generations). Remember the Hippie/Yuppie culture? Here comes the echo!